Title

Author

Degree

Master of Arts

Program

Comparative Literature

Supervisor

Teresa Hubel

Abstract

This project is an inquiry into modes of decolonial resistance that mobilize alternative relationships to the past against the modern/colonial writing of history from a Eurocentric perspective taken as universal. I contend that knowledges and memories rooted in non-Western cultural traditions have formed the epistemological basis for ongoing opposition to the hegemonic conception of history as the unfolding of global structural transformations on a single, homogenous timescale. I examine works by Frantz Fanon, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Zapatista videomakers that expressly reject a Eurocentric, monotopic perspective of history. My objective is to demonstrate the decolonial efforts of intellectuals and ordinary people to critically engage this hegemonic understanding of history from its epistemic borders and propose alternatives which do not merely repeat the monological impulse by replacing the West’s imperialist perspective of history with the orthodoxy of another cultural or national tradition.